The Standing Wheelchair

August 17, 2006 With Segway releasing its second generation design earlier this week, this Standing WheelChair concept showcased on CoolHunter becomes much closer to reality - indeed, we'd be very surprised if the remarkably fertile mind of Dean Kamen, who is responsible for both the Segway and the iBot hadn't thought of this along the way given that the iBot morphs both concepts, and can be further extended to the four-wheeled Segway Centaur.

Then there's traces of BRP's Embrio one-wheeler, Tommy Forsgren's Hermes concept (still one of the most inspiring and appealing designs we have ever seen) and of course the use of Osmos' wheel technology always adds a bit of sex appeal to any design. The standing wheelchair allows people to stand upright. For those with full mobility, it looks like fun, for those who are handicapped in their mobility, such a device would be enormously empowering.

Mike grew up thinking he would become a mathematician, accidentally started motorcycle racing, got a job writing road tests for a motorcycle magazine while at university, and became a writer. As a travelling photojournalist during his early career, his work was published in a dozen languages across 20+ countries. He went on to edit or manage over 50 print publications, with target audiences ranging from pensioners to plumbers, many different sports, many car and motorcycle magazines, with many more in the fields of communication - narrow subject magazines on topics such as advertising, marketing, visual communications, design, presentation and direct marketing. Then came the internet and Mike managed internet projects for Australia's largest multimedia company, Telstra.com.au (Australia's largest Telco), Seek.com.au (Australia's largest employment site), top100.com.au, hitwise.com, and a dozen other internet start-ups before founding Gizmag in 2002. Now he writes and thinks.